




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 


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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 










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THE 


NURNBERG 


STOVE 


BY 


OUIDA 


tLOUISA DE LA RAME^ 


ILL US T/? A TED, 


1? 


C(A 

R. F. FENNO & COMPANY, " 

112 Fifth Ave. 


K 





Copyright, 1895, 

BY 


R. F. FENNO & COMPANY. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


August lived in a little town called Hall. 
Hall is a favourite name for several towns in 
Austria and in Germany, but this one especial 
little Hall, in the Ober-Innthal, is one of the 
most charming old-world places that I know, 
and August for his part did not know any 
other. It has the green meadows and the great 
mountains all about it, and the grey-green 
glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved 
streets and enchanting little shops that have all 
latticed panes and iron gratings to them ; it has 
a very grand old Gothic church, that has the 
noblest blendings of light and shadov;, and 
marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of 
infinite strength and repose as a church should 
have. Then there is the Miinzthurm, black 
and white, rising out of greenery and looking 
down on a long wooden bridge and the broad 
5 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


rapid river; and there is an old Schloss which 
has been made into a guard-house, with battle- 
ments and frescoes and heraldic devices in gold 
and colours, and a man-at-arms carved in stone 
standing life-size in his niche and bearing his 
date 1530. A little farther on, but close at 
hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble col- 
umns and tombs, and a colossal wood-carved 
Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich 
chapel ; indeed, so full is the little town of the 
undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like 
opening a missal of the middle ages, all em- 
blazoned and illuminated with saints and war- 
riors, and it is so clean, and so still, and so 
noble, by reason of its monuments and its his- 
toric colour, that I marvel much no one has 
ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious 
heroic life of an age at once more restful and 
more brave than ours still leaves its spirit 
there, and then there is the girdle of the moun- 
tains all around, and that alone means strength, 
peace, majesty. 

In this little town a few years ago August 
Strehla lived with his people in the stone-paved 

irregular square where the grand church stands. 

6 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


He was a small boy of nine years old at that 
time; a chubby-faced little man with rosy 
cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the 
brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his 
father was poor, and there were many mouths 
at home to feed. In this country the winters 
are long and very cold, the whole land lies 
wrapped in snow for many months, and this 
night that he was trotting home, with a jug of 
beer in his numb red hands, was terribly cold 
and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had 
shut their double shutters, and the few lamps 
there were flickered dully behind their quaint, 
old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains in- 
deed were beautiful, all snow white under the 
stars that are so big in frost. Hardly any one 
was astir; a few good souls were wending home 
from vespers, a tired postboy blew a shrill blast 
from his tasselled horn as he pulled up his 
sledge before a hostelry, and little August hug- 
ging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin 
coat, were all who were abroad, for the snow 
fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go early 
to their beds. He could not run or he would 
have spilled the beer; he was half frozen and a 
7 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


little frightened, but he kept up his courage by 
saying over and over again to himself, “ I shall 
soon be at home with dear Hirschvogel.” 

He went on through the streets, past the 
stone man-at-arms of the guard-house, and so 
into the place where the great church was, and 
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla’s 
house, with a sculptured Bethlehem over the 
doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the Three 
Kings painted on its wall. He had been sent 
on a long errand outside the gates in the after- 
noon, over the frozen fields and the broad white 
snow, and had been belated, and had thought 
he had heard the wolves behind him at every 
step, and had reached the town in a great state 
of terror, thankful with all his little panting 
heart to see the oil-lamp burning under the 
first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to 
call for the beer, and he carried it carefully 
now, though his hands were so numb that he 
was afraid they would let the jug down every 
moment. 

The snow outlined with white every gable 
and cornice of the beautiful old wooden houses ; 

the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the 
8 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the 
quaint devices that hung before the doors; 
covered lamps burned before the Nativities and 
Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into the 
woodwork; here and there, where a shutter had 
not been closed, a ruddy firelight lit up a 
homely interior, with the noisy band of chil- 
dren clustering round the house-mother and a 
big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and 
listening to the cobbler or the barber’s story of 
a neighbour, while the oil-wicks glimmered, 
and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chestnuts 
sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little 
August saw all these things as he saw every- 
thing with his two big bright eyes that had 
such curious lights and shadows in them ; but 
he went heedfully on his way for sake of the 
beer which a single slip of the foot would make 
him spill. At his knock and call the solid oak 
door, four centuries old if one, flew open, and 
the boy darted in with his beer, and shouted 
with all the force of mirthful lungs, “ Oh, dear 
Hirschvogel, but for the thought of you I should 
have died!” 

It was a large barren room into which he 
9 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


rushed with so much pleasure, and the bricks 
were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood 
press, handsome and very old, a broad deal 
table, and several wooden stools for all its 
furniture; but at the top of the chamber, send- 
ing out warmth and colour together as the lamp 
shed its rays upon it, was a tower of porcelain, 
burnished with all the hues of a king’s peacock 
and a queen’s jewels, and surmounted with 
armed figures, and shields, and flowers of her- 
aldry, and a great golden crown upon the high- 
est summit of all. 

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the let- 
ters H. R. H., for it was in every portion the 
handwork of the great potter of Niirnberg, 
Augustin Hirschvogel, who put hi^ mark thus, 
as all the world knows. 

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and 
been made for princes, had warmed the crim- 
son stockings of cardinals and the gold-broid- 
ered shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in 
presence-chambers, and lent its carbon to help 
kindle sharp brains in anxious councils of state; 
no one knew what it had seen or done or been 

fashioned for; but it was a right royal thing. 

10 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Yet perhaps it had never been more useful than 
it was now in this poor desolate room, sending 
down heat and comfort into the troop of chil- 
dren tumbled together on a wolf-skin at its feet, 
who received frozen August amongst them with 
loud shouts of joy. 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so 
cold!” said August kissing its gilded lion’s 
claws. “ Is father not in, Dorothea?” 

“No, dear. He is late.” 

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen ; dark- 
haired and serious, and with a sweet sad face ; 
for she had had many cares laid on her shoul- 
ders, even whilst still a mere baby. She was 
the eldest of the Strehla family ; and there were 
ten of them in all. Next to her there came Jan 
and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little 
for their own living; and then came August, 
who went up in the summer to the high Alps 
with the farmers’ cattle, but in winter could do 
nothing to fill his own little platter and pot; 
and then all the little ones, who could only 
open their mouths to be fed like young birds, 
Albrecht and Hilda, and Waldo and Christof, 
and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


with eyes like forget-me-nots, whose birth had 
cost them the life of their mother. 

They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, 
half Italian, so common in the Tyrol ; some of 
the children were white and golden as lilies, 
others were brown and brilliant as fresh fallen 
chestnuts; the father was a good man, but 
weak and weary with so many to find food for, 
and so little to do it with. He worked at the 
salt- furnaces, and by that gained a few florins; 
people said he would have worked better and 
kept his family more easily if he had not loved 
his pipe and a draft of ale too well ; but this 
had only been said of him after his wife’s 
death, when trouble and perplexity had begun 
to dull a brain never too vigorous, and enfeeble 
farther a character already too 5delding. As it 
was, the wolf often bayed at the door of the 
Strehla household, without a wolf from the 
mountains coming down. Dorothea was one of 
those maidens who almost work miracles so far 
can their industry and care and intelligence 
make a home sweet and wholesome, and a sin- 
gle loaf seem to swell into twenty. The chil- 
dren were always clean and happy, and the 
12 


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THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


table was seldom without its big pot of soup 
once a day. Still very poor they were, and 
Dorothea’s heart ached with shame, for she 
knew that their father’s debts were many for 
flour, and meat, and clothing. Of fuel to feed 
the big stove they had always enough without 
cost, for their mother’s father was alive, and 
sold wood and fir cones and coke, and never 
grudged them to his grandchildren, though he 
grumbled at Strehla’s improvidence and hap- 
less, dreamy ways. 

“ Father says we are never to wait for him ; 
we will have supper now you have come home, 
dear,” said Dorothea, who, however she might 
fret her soul in secret as she knitted their hose 
and mended their shirts, never let her anxieties 
cast a gloom on the children ; only to August 
she did speak a little sometimes, because he 
was so thoughtful and so tender of her always, 
and knew as well as she did that there were 
troubles about money; though these troubles 
were vague to them both, and the debtors were 
patient and kindly, being neighbours all in the 
old twisting streets between the guard-house 
and the river. 


13 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big 
slices of brown bread swimming in it and some 
onions bobbing up and down; the bowl was 
soon emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then 
the three eldest boys slipped off to bed, being 
tired with their rough bodily labour in the snow 
all day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel 
by the stove and set it whirring; and the little 
ones got August down upon the old worn wolf- 
skin and clamoured to him for a picture or 
a story. For August was the artist of the 
family. 

He had a piece of planed deal that his father 
had givbn him, and some sticks of charcoal, and 
he would draw a hundred things he had seen in 
the day; sweeping each out^with his elbow 
when the children had seen enough of it and 
sketching another in its stead : faces and dogs’ 
heads, and men in sledges, and old women in 
their furs, and pine trees, and cocks and hens, 
and all sorts of animals, and now and then — 
very reverently — a Madonna and Child. It was 
all very rough, for there was no one to teach 
him anything. But it was all life-like, and 
kept the whole troop of children shrieking with 

14 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


laughter, or watching breathless, with wide 
open, wondering, awed eyes. 

They were all so happy : what did they care 
for the snow outside? Their little bodies were 
warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea, 
troubled about the bread for the morrow, 
laughed as she span ; and August, with all his 
soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda’s 
cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen 
afternoon, cried out loud smiling, as he looked 
up at the stove that was shedding its heat down 
on them all: 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as 
great and good as the sun! No; you are 
greater and better I think, because he goes 
away nobody knows where all these long, dark, 
cold hours, and does not care how people die 
for want of him ; but you — you are always ready, 
just a little bit of wood to feed you and you will 
make a summer for us all the winter through!” 

The grand old stove seemed to smile through 
all its irridescent surface at the praises of the 
child. No doubt the stove, though it had 
known three centuries and more, had known 
but very little gratitude. 

15 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


It was one of those magnificent stoves in 
enamelled faience which so excited the jealousy 
of the other potters of Niirnberg that in a 
body they demanded of the magistracy that 
Augustin Hirschvogel should be forbidden to 
make any more of them ; the magistracy, hap- 
pily, proving of a broader mind, and having no 
sympathy with the wish of the artisans to crip- 
ple their greater fellow. 

It was of great height and breadth, with all 
the majolica lustre which Hirschvogel learned 
to give to his enamels when he was making 
love to the young Venetian girl whom he after- 
wards married. There was the statue of a 
king at each corner, modelled with as much 
force and splendour as his friend Albrecht 
Durer could have given unto them on copper- 
plate or canvas. The body of the stove itself 
was divided into panels, which had the Ages of 
Man painted on them in polychrome, the bor- 
ders of the panels had roses and holly and 
laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes 
in black letter of odd old-world moralising, 
such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after 
them, loved to have on their chimney places 

i6 


. THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flag- 
ons. The whole was burnished with gilding in 
many parts, and was radiant everywhere with 
that brilliant colouring of which the whole 
Hirschvogel famil}^ painters on glass and great 
in chemistry as they were, were all masters. 

The stove was a very grand thing as I say ; 
possibly Hirschvogel had made it for some 
mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he 
was an imperial guest at Innspruck, and fash- 
ioned so many things for the Schloss Amras 
and beautiful Philippine Welser, the burgher’s 
daughter, who gained an archduke’s heart by 
her beauty and the right to wear his honours 
by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove 
at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather 
Strehla, who had been a master mason, had 
dug it up out of some ruins where he was build- 
ing, and finding it without a flaw, had taken it 
home, and only thought it worth finding be- 
cause it was such a good one to burn. That 
was now sixty years past, and ever since then 
the stove had stood in the big desolate empty 
room warming three generations of the Strehla 

family, and having seen nothing prettier per- 

2 17 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


haps in all its many years than the children 
tumbled now in a cluster like gathered flowers 
at its feet. For the Strehla children, born to 
nothing else, were all born with beauty; white 
or brown, they were equally lovely to look 
upon, and when the)’ went into the church to 
mass with their curling locks and their clasped 
hands, they stood under the grim statues like 
cherubs flown down off some fresco. 

“Tell us a story, August,” they cried in 
chorus, when they had seen charcoal pictures 
till they were tired ; and August did as he did 
every night pretty nearly, looked up at the 
stove and told them what he imagined of the 
many adventures and joys and sorrows of the 
human beings who figured on the panels from 
his cradle to his grave. 

To the children the stove was a household 
god. In summer they laid a mat of fresh moss 
all round it, and dressed it up with green 
boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flow- 
ers of the Tyrol country. In winter all their 
joys centred in it, and scampering home from 
school over the ice and snow they were happy, 
knowing that they would soon be cracking nuts 

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THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent glow 
of its noble tower which rose eight feet high 
above them with all its spires and pinnacles 
and crowns. 

Once a travelling pedlar had told them that 
the letters on it meant Augustin Hirschvogel, 
and that Hirschvogel had been a great German 
potter and painter, like his father before him, 
in the art-sanctified city of Niirnberg, and had 
made many such stoves that were all miracles 
of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his 
heart and his soul and his faith into his labours, 
as the men of those earlier ages did, and think- 
ing but little of gold or praise. 

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not 
far from the church, had told him a little more 
about the brave family of Hirschvogel, whose 
houses can be seen in Niirnberg to this day; of 
old Viet, the first of them, who painted the 
Gothic windows of S. Sebald with the marriage 
of the Margravine; of his sons and of his grand- 
sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of 
them great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of 
the North. And August’s imagination, always 
quick, had made a living personage out of 

19 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as 
though he were in the flesh walking up and 
down the Maximilian Strasse in his visit to Inn- 
spruck, and maturing beautiful things in his 
brain as he stood on the bridge and gazed on 
the emerald green flood of the Inn. 

So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel 
in the family as if it were a living creature, 
and little August was very proud because he 
had been named after that famous old dead 
German who had had the genius to make so 
glorious a thing. All the children loved the 
stove, but with August the love of it was a pas- 
sion ; and in his secret heart he used to say to 
himself, “When I am a man I will make just 
such things too, and then I will set Hirschvogel 
in a beautiful room in a house that I will build 
myself in Innspruck just outside the gates 
where the chestnuts are by the river — that is 
what I will do when I am a man.” 

For August, a salt-baker’s son and a little 
cow-keeper when he was anything, was a 
dreamer of dreams; and when he was upon the 
high alps with his cattle, with the stillness and 

the sky around him, was quite certain that he 
20 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


would live for greater things than driving the 
herds up when the springtide came amongst the 
blue sea of gentians, or toiling down in the 
town with wood and with timber as his father 
and grandfather did every day of their lives. 
He was a strong and healthy little fellow, fed 
on the free mountain air, and he was very 
happy, and loved his family devotedly, and was 
as active as a squirrel and as playful as a hare, 
but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some 
of them went a very long way for a little boy 
who was only one amongst many, and whom 
nobody had ever paid any attention except to 
teach him his letters, and tell him to fear God. 
August in winter was only a little, hungry 
schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the 
priest, or to bring the loaves from the bake- 
house, or to carry his father’s boots to the cob- 
bler; and in summer he was only one of hun- 
dreds of cow-boys, who drove the poor, half- 
blind, blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing their 
throat bells, out into the sweet intoxication of 
the sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in 
the heights amongst the Alpine roses, with only 
the clouds and the snow summits near. But he 


21 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


was always thinking, thinking, thinking for all 
that; and under his little sheepskin winter coat 
and his rough hempen summer shirt his heart 
had as much courage in it as Hofer’s ever had 
— great Hofer, who is a household word in all 
the Innthal, and whom August always rever- 
ently remembered when he went to the city of 
Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water- 
mill and under the wooded height of Berg Isel. 

August lay now in the warmth of the stove 
and told the children stories, his own little 
brown face growing red with excitement as his 
imagination glowed to fever heat. That hu- 
man being on the panels, who was drawn there 
as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing amongst 
flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a 
soldier in the midst of strife, as a father with 
children round him, as a weary, old, blind man 
on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul 
raised up by angels, had always had the most 
intense interest for August, and he had made, 
not one history for him, but a thousand; he sel- 
dom told them the same tale twice. He had 
never seen a story-book in his life; his primer 
and his mass-book were all the volumes he had. 


22 


THE nCrNBERG stove. 


But nature had given him Fancy, and she is a 
good fairy that makes up for the want of very 
many things; only, alas! her wings are so very 
soon broken, poor thing, and then she is of no 
use at all. 

“ It is time for you all to go to bed, children,” 
said Dorothea, looking up from her spinning. 
“ Father is very late to-night, you must not sit 
up for him.” 

“Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!” 
they pleaded; and little rosy and golden Er- 
mengilda climbed up into her lap. “ Hirsch- 
vogel is so warm, the beds are never so warm 
as he; cannot you tell us another tale, August?” 

“No,” cried August, whose face had lost its 
light now that his story had come to an end, 
and who sat serious, with his hands clasped on 
his knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques 
of the stove. 

“It is only a week to Christmas,” he said 
suddenly. 

“Grandmother’s big cakes!” chuckled little 
Christof, who was five years old, and thought 
Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else. 

“What will Santa Claus find for ’Gilda if she 

23 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


be good?” murmured Dorothea over the child’s 
sunny head; for however hard poverty might 
pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that 
Dorothea would not find some wooden toy and 
some rosy apples to put in her little sister’s 
socks. 

“ Father Max has promised me a big goose, 
because I saved the calf’s life in June,” said 
August; it was the twentieth time he had told 
them so that month, he was so proud of it. 

“And Aunt Maila will be sure to send us 
wine and honey and a barrel of flour, she 
always does,” said Albrecht; their Aunt Maila 
had a chalet and a little farm over on the green 
slopes toward Dorf Ampas. 

“ I shall go up into the woods and get Hirsch- 
vogel’s crown,” said August; they always 
crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine 
boughs and ivy and mountain berries. The 
heat soon withered the crown, but it w^as part 
of the religion of the day to them, as much so 
as it was to cross themselves in church, and 
raise their voices in the “O Salutaris Hostia.” 

And they fell chatting of all they would do 

on the Christnight, and one little voice piped 
24 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


loud against another’s, and they were as happy 
as though their stockings would be full of 
golden purses and jewelled toys, and the big 
goose in the soup-pot seemed to them such a 
meal as kings would envy. 

In the midst of their chatter and laughter a 
blast of frozen air and a spray of driven snow 
struck like ice through the room, and reached 
them even in the warmth of the old wolf-skins 
and the great stove. It was the door which 
had opened and let in the cold; it was their 
father who had come home. 

The younger children ran joyous to meet him. 
Dorothea pushed the one wooden arm-chair of 
the room to the stove, and August flew to set 
the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill 
a long clay pipe ; for their father was good to 
them all, and seldom raised his voice in anger, 
and they had been trained by the mother they 
had loved to dutifulness and obedience and a 
watchful affection. 

To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily 
to the young ones’ welcome, and came to the 
wooden chair with a tired step and sat down 
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer. 

25 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“Are you not well, dear father?” his daugh- 
ter asked him. 

“I am well enough,” he answered dully; 
and sat there with his head bent, letting the 
lighted pipe grow cold. 

He was a fair, tall man, grey before his time, 
and bowed with labour. 

“Take the children to bed,” he said suddenly 
at last, and Dorothea obeyed. August stayed 
behind, curled before the stove; at nine years 
old, and when one earns money in the summer 
from the farmers, one is not altogether a child 
any more, at least in one’s own estimation. 

August did not heed his father’s silence; he 
was used to it. Karl Strehla was a man of few 
words, and being of weakly health was usually 
too tired at the end of the day to do more than 
drink his beer and sleep. August lay on the 
wolf-skin, dreamy and comfortable, looking up 
through his drooping eyelids at the golden 
coronets on the crest of the great stove, and 
wondering for the millionth time whom it had 
been made for, and what grand places and 
scenes it had known. 

Dorothea came down from putting the little 

26 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


ones in their beds; the cuckoo-clock in the cor- 
ner struck eight; she looked at her father and 
the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spin- 
ning saying nothing. She thought he had been 
drinking in some tavern, it had been often so 
with him of late. 

There was a long silence; the cuckoo called 
the quarter twice ; August dropped asleep, his 
curls falling over his face; Dorothea’s wheel 
hummed like a cat. 

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the 
table, sending the pipe on the ground. 

“I have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and his 
voice was husky and ashamed in his throat. 
The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang 
erect out of his sleep. 

“ Sold Hirschvogel !” — if their father had 
dashed the holy crucifix on the floor at their 
feet and spat on it they could not have shud- 
dered under the horror of a greater blasphemy. 

“ I have sold Hirschvogel !” said Karl Strehla, 
in the same husky, dogged voice. “ I have sold 
it to a travelling trader in such things for two 
hundred florins. What would you? — I owe 

double that. He saw it this morning when 
27 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


3^ou were all out. He will pack it and take it 
to Munich to-morrow." 

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry : 

“Oh, father — the children — in mid-winter!" 

She turned white as the snow without; her 
words died away in her throat. 

August stood, half blind with sleep, staring 
with dazed eyes as his cattle stared at the sun 
when they came out from their winter’s prison. 

“ It is not true! It is not true !" he muttered. 
“You are jesting, father?" 

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh. 

“ It is true. Would you like to know what is 
true too? — that the bread you eat and the meat 
you put in this pot, and the roof you have over 
your heads are none of them paid for, have been 
none of them paid for for months and months; 
if it had not been for your grandfather I should 
have been in prison all summer and autumn, 
and he is out of patience and will do no more 
now. There is no work to be had, the masters 
go to younger men ; they say I work ill ; it may 
be so. Who can keep his head above water 
with ten hungry children dragging him down> 

When your mother lived it was different. Boy, 
28 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


you Stare at me as if I were a mad dog! You 
have made a god of yon china thing. Well, — 
it goes: goes to-morrow. Two hundred florins, 
that is something. It will keep me out of 
prison for a little, and with the spring things 
may turn ” 

August stood like a creature paralysed. His 
eyes were wide open, fastened on his father’s 
with terror and incredulous horror; his face 
had grown as white as his sister’s; his chest 
heaved with tearless sobs. 

“ It is not true 1 It is not true!” he echoed 
stupidly. It seemed to him that the very skies 
must fall, and the earth perish, if they could 
take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon 
talk of tearing down God’s sun out of the 
heavens. 

“You will find it true,” said his father dog- 
gedly, and angered because he was in his own 
soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away the 
heirloom and treasure of his race and the com- 
fort and health-giver of his young children. 
“You will find it true. The dealer has paid 
me half the money to-night, and will pay me 

the other half to-morrow when he packs it up 
29 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is 
worth a great deal more — at least I suppose so, 
as he gives that — but beggars cannot be 
choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen 
will warm you all just as well. Who would 
keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor house 
like this, when one can make two hundred 
florins by it? Dorothea, you never sobbed more 
when your mother died. What is it, when all 
is said — a bit of hardware much too grand-look- 
ing for such a room as this. If all the Strehlas 
had not been born fools it would have been sold 
a century ago, when it was dug up out of the 
ground. ‘It is a stove for a museum,’ the 
trader said when he saw it. To a museum let 
it go.” 

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s 
when it is caught for its death, and threw him- 
self on his knees at his father’s feet. 

“Oh, father, father!” he cried convulsively, 
his hands closing on Strehla’s knees, and his 
uplifted face blanched and distorted with ter- 
ror. “ Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean 
what you say? Send it away? our life, our sun, 
our joy, our comfort? We shall all die in the 

30 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


dark and the cold. Sell me rather. Sell me to 
any trade or any pain you like ; I will not mind. 
But Hirschvogel! — it is like selling the very 
cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You 
could not do such a thing — you could not ! — you 
who have always been gentle and good, and 
who have sat in the warmth here year after 
year without mother. It is not a piece of hard- 
ware as you say ; it is a living thing, for a great 
man’s thoughts and fancies have put life into 
it, and it loves us though we are only poor little 
children, and we love it with all our hearts and 
souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead 
Hirschvogel knows! Oh listen, I will go and 
try and get work to-morrow ! I will ask them to 
let me cut ice or make the paths through the 
snow. There must be something I could do, 
and I will beg the people we owe money to 
wait; they are all neighbours, they will be 
patient — but sell Hirschvogel! — oh, never! 
never! never! Give the florins back to the 
vile man. Tell him it would be like selling 
the shroud out of mother’s coffin, or the golden 
curls off Ermengilda’s head! Oh, father! dear 
father! do hear me, for pity’s sake!” 

31 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Strehla was moved by the boy’s anguish. 
He loved his children, though he was often 
weary of them, and their pain was pain to him. 
But besides emotion, and stronger than emo- 
tion, was the anger that August roused in him ; 
he hated and despised himself for the barter of 
the heirloom of his race, and every word of the 
child stung him with a stinging sense of shame. 

And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his 
sorrow. 

“You are a little fool,” he said harshly, as 
they had never heard him speak. “You rave 
like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The 
stove is sold. There is no more to be said. 
Children like you have nothing to do with such 
matters. The stove is sold and goes to Munich 
to-morrow. What is it to you? Be thankful I 
can get bread for you. Get on your legs I say, 
and go to bed.” 

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, 
and drained it slowly as a man who had no cares. 

August sprung to his feet and threw his hair 
back off his face; the blood rushed into his 
cheeks, making them scarlet; his great soft 
eyes flamed alight with furious passion. 

32 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“You dare not!” he cried aloud, “you dare 
not sell it I say! It is not yours alone, it is 
ours ” 

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks 
with a force that shivered it to atoms, and ris- 
ing to his feet struck his son a blow that felled 
him to the floor. It was the first time in all his 
life that he had ever raised his hand against 
any one of his children. 

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his 
elbow and stumbled off to his own chamber 
with a cloud before his eyes. 

“What has happened?” said August a little 
while later as he opened his eyes and saw Doro- 
thea weeping above him on the wolf-skin before 
the stove. He had been struck backwards, and 
his head had fallen on the hard bricks where 
the wolf-skin did not reach. He sat up a mo- 
ment with his face bent upon his hands. 

“I remember now,” he said very low under 
his breath. 

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her 
tears fell like rain. 

“ But, oh ! dear, how could you speak so to 
father!” she murmured. “ It was very wrong.” 

3 33 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“ No, I was right,” said August, and his little 
mouth, that hitherto had only curled in laugh- 
ter, curved downward with a fixed and bitter 
seriousness. “ How dare he? How dare he?” 
he muttered with his head sunk in his hands. 
“ It is not his alone. It belongs to us all. It 
is as much yours and mine as it is his.” 

Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was 
too frightened to speak. The authority of their 
parents in the house had never in her remem- 
brance been questioned. 

“ Are you hurt by the fall, dear August?” she 
murmured at length, for he looked to her so pale 
and strange. 

“Yes — no. I do not know. What does it 
matter?” 

He sat up upon the wolf-skin with passionate 
pain upon his face ; all his soul was in rebellion, 
and he was only a child and was powerless. 

“It is a sin — it is a theft — it is an infamy,” 
he said slowly, his eyes fastened on the gilded 
feet of Hirschvogel. 

“Oh, August, do not say such things of 
father,” sobbed his sister. “ Whatever he does, 
we ought to think it right.” 

34 


THE NURNLERG STOVE. 


August laughed aloud. 

“ Is it right that he should spend his money 
in drink? — that he should let orders lie un- 
executed? — that he should do his work so ill, 
that no one cares to employ him? — that he 
should live on grandfather’s charity, and then 
dare sell a thing that is ours every whit as 
much as it is his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, 
dear God! I would sooner sell my soul!” 

“August!” cried Dorothea with piteous en- 
treaty. He terrified her ; she could not recog- 
nise her little gay, gentle brother in those fierce 
and blasphemous words. 

August laughed aloud again ; then all at once 
his laughter broke down into bitterest weeping. 
He threw himself forward on the stove, cover- 
ing it with kisses, and sobbing as though his 
heart would burst from his bosom. 

What could he do? Nothing, nothing, noth- 
ing! 

“August, dear August,” whispered Dorothea 
piteously, and trembling all over, for she was a 
very gentle girl and fierce feeling terrified her. 
“ August, do not lie there — come to bed — it is 
quite late. In the morning you will be calmer. 

35 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold, 
at least the little ones; but if it be father’s 
will ” 

“Let me alone,” said August through his 
teeth, striving to still the storm of sobs that 
shook him from head to foot. “ Let me alone. 
In the morning! — how can you speak of the 
morning?” 

“Come to bed, dear,” sighed his sister. 
“Oh, August, do not lie and look like that — 
you frighten me. Do come to bed.” 

“ I shall stay here.” 

“Here! all night!” 

“ They might take it in the night. Besides, 
to leave it now T 

“ But it is cold! the fire is out.” 

“ It will never be warm any more, nor shall 
we.” 

All his childhood had gone out of him, all 
his gleeful, careless, sunny temper had gone 
with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily, 
choking down the great sobs in his chest. 
To him it was as if the end of the world had 
come. 

His sister lingered by him while striving to 
36 




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


persuade him to go to his place in the little 
crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo 
and Christof. But it was in vain. “ I shall 
stay here,” was all he answered her. And he 
stayed — all the night long. 

The lamps went out ; the rats came and ran 
across the floor ; as the hours crept on through 
midnight and past the cold intensified and the 
air of the room grew like ice. August did not 
move; he lay with his face downward on the 
golden and rainbow-hued pedestal of the house- 
hold treasure, which henceforth was to be cold 
for evermore — an exiled thing in a foreign city 
in a far-off land. 

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers 
came down the stairs and let themselves out, 
each bearing his lantern and going to his work 
in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt- 
works. They did not notice him ; they did not 
know what had happened. 

A little later his sister came down with a 
light in her hand to make ready the house ere 
morning should break. 

She stole up to him and laid her hand on his 
shoulder timidly. 


37 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“ Dear August, you must be frozen. August, 
do look up — do speak!” 

August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, 
sullen look in them that she had never seen 
there. His face was ashen white: his lips were 
like fire. He had not slept all night; but his 
passionate sobs had given way to delirious 
waking dreams and numb senseless trances, 
which had alternated one on another all through 
the freezing, lonely, horrible hours. 

“ It will never be warm again,” he muttered, 
“never again!” 

Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands. 

“ August ! do you not know me?” she cried in 
an agony. “ I am Dorothea. Wake up, dear — 
wake up! It is morning, only so dark!” 

August shuddered all over. 

“The morning!” he echoed. 

He slowly rose up on to his feet. 

“ I will go to grandfather,” he said very low. 
“He is always good; perhaps he could save 
it.” 

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of 
the house-door drowned his words. A strange 

voice called aloud through the keyhole : 

38 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“Let me in! Quick — there is no time to 
lose! More snow like this, and the roads will 
all be blocked. Let me in! Do you hear? I 
am come to take the great stove.” 

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his 
eyes blazing. 

“You shall never touch it!” he screamed, 
“you shall never touch it!” 

“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big man 
who was a Bavarian, amused at the fierce little 
figure fronting him. 

“ I !” said August. “ You shall never have it 
— you shall kill me first!” 

“ Strehla, ” said the big man as August’s father 
entered the room, “ you have got a little mad 
dog here; muzzle him.” 

One way and another they did muzzle him. 
He fought like a little demon and hit out right 
and left, and one of his blows gave the Bava- 
rian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by 
four grown men, and his father flung him with 
no light hand out from the door of the back 
entrance, and the buyers of the stately and 
beautiful stove set to work to pack it heedfully 
and carry it away. 


39 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


When Dorothea stole out to look for August, 
he was nowhere in sight. She went back to 
little ’Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over 
the child, whilst the others stood looking on, 
dimly understanding that with Hirschvogel was 
going all the warmth of their bodies, all the 
light of their hearth. 

Even their father now was sorry and ashamed ; 
but two hundred florins seemed a big sum to 
him, and, after all, he thought the children 
could warm themselves quite as well at the 
black iron stove in the kitchen. Besides, 
whether he regretted it now or no, the work of 
the Niirnberg potter was sold irrevocably, and 
he had to stand still and see the men from 
Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear 
it out into the snowy air to where an ox-cart 
stood in waiting for it. 

In another moment Hirschvogel was gone — 
gone for ever and aye. 

August had stood still for a time, leaning, 
sick and faint from the violence that had been 
used to him, against the back wall of the house. 
The wall looked on a court where a well was, 

and the backs of other houses, and beyond them 
40 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


the Spire of the Munzthurm and the peaks of 
the mountains. 

Into the court an old neighbour hobbled for 
water, and seeing the boy said to him : 

“ Child, is it true your father is selling the 
big painted stove?” 

August nodded his head, then burst into a 
passion of tears. 

“Well, for sure he is a fool,” said the neigh- 
bour. “ Heaven forgive me for calling him 
so before his own child! but the stove was 
worth a mint of money. I do remember in my 
young days, in old Anton’s time (that was your 
great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from 
Vienna saw it, and said that it was worth its 
weight in gold.” 

August’s sobs went on their broken, impetu- 
ous course. 

“I loved it! I loved it!” he moaned. “Ido 
not care what its value was. I loved it! 1 
loved it! ” 

“You little simpleton!” said the old man 
kindly. “ But you are wiser than your father, 
when all’s said. If sell it he must, he should 
have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at 

41 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Spriiz, who woiild have given him honest value. 
But no doubt they took him over his beer — aye, 
aye! but if I were you I would do better than 
cry. I would go after it.” 

August raised his head, the tears raining 
down his cheeks. 

“ Go after it when you are bigger,” said the 
neighbour, with a good-natured wish to cheer 
him up a little. “ The world is a small thing 
after all ; I was a travelling clockmaker once 
upon a time, and I know that your stove will be 
safe enough whoever gets it; anything that can 
be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up 
in cotton wool by everybody — aye, aye, don’t 
cry so much, you will see your stove again 
some day.” 

Then the old man hobbled away to draw his 
brazen pail full of water at the well. 

August remained leaning against the wall; 
his head was buzzing and his heart fluttering 
with the new idea which had presented itself to 
his mind. “ Go after it,” had said the old man. 
He thought, “ Why not go with it?” He loved 
it better than any one, even better than Doro- 
thea; and he shrunk from the thought of meet- 
42 


THE NttRNBERG STOVE. 


ing his father again, his father who had sold 
Hirschvogel. 

He was by this time in that state of exalta- 
tion in which the impossible looks quite natural 
and commonplace. His tears were still wet on 
his pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. 
He ran out of the courtyard by a little gate, 
and across to the huge Gothic porch of the 
church. From there he could watch unseen 
his father’s house-door, at which were always 
hanging some blue and grey pitchers, such as 
are common and so picturesque in Austria, for 
part of the house was let to a man who dealt in 
pottery. 

He hid himself in the grand portico, which 
he had so often passed through to go to mass or 
complin within, and presently his heart gave 
a great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped 
stove brought out and laid with infinite care on 
the bullock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men 
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-waggon 
slowly crept over the snow of the place ; snow 
crisp and hard as stone. The noble old min- 
ster looked its grandest and most solemn, with 
its dark grey stone and its vast archways, and 
43 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


its porch that was itself as big as many a 
church, and its strange gargoyles and lamp- 
irons black against the snow on its roof and on 
the pavement ; but for once August had no eyes 
for it, he only watched for his old friend. Then 
he, a little unnoticeable figure enough, like a 
score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen by 
any of his brothers or sisters, out of the porch 
and over the shelving uneven square, and fol- 
lowed in the wake of the dray. 

Its course lay towards the station of the rail- 
way, which is close to the salt-works, whose 
smoke at times sullies this part of clean little 
Hall, though it does not do very much damage. 
From Hall the iron road runs northward through 
glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, 
Buda, and southward over the Brenner into 
Italy. Was Hirschvogel going north or south? 
This at least he would soon know. 

August had often hung about the little station, 
watching the trains come and go, and dive into 
the heart of the hills and vanish. No one said 
anything to him for idling about; people are 
kind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleas- 
ant land, and children and dogs are both happy 
44 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and 
vociferating a great deal, and learned that they 
meant to go too and wanted to go with the great 
stove itself. But this they could not do, for 
neither could the stove go by a passenger train 
or they themselves go in a goods train. So at 
length they insured their precious burden for a 
large sum, and consented to send it by a lug- 
gage train which was to pass through Hall in 
half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign 
to notice the existence of Hall at all. 

August heard, and a desperate resolve made 
itself up in his little mind. Where Hirschvogel 
went would he go. He gave one terrible 
thought to Dorothea — poor, gentle Dorothea! — 
sitting in the cold at home, then set to work 
to execute his project. How he managed it he 
never knew very clearly himself, but certain it 
is that when the goods train from the north, that 
had come all the wa}^ from Linz on the Danube, 
moved out of Hall, August was hidden behind 
the stove in the great covered truck, and 
wedged, unseen and undreamt of by any human 
creature, amidst the cases of wood-carving, of 
clocks and clockwork, of Vienna toys, of Turk- 
45 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


ish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian 
wines, which shared the same abode as did his 
swathed and bound Hirschvogel. No doubt he 
was very naughty, but it never occurred to him 
that he was so; his whole mind and soul were 
absorbed in the one entrancing idea : to follow 
his beloved friend and fire-king. 

It was very dark in the closed truck, which 
had only a little window above the door; and 
it was crowded, and had a strong smell in it 
from the Russian hides and the hams that were 
in it. But August was not frightened ; he was 
close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to 
be closer still ; for he meant to do nothing less 
than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a 
shrewd little boy, and having had by great 
luck two silver groschen in his breeches pocket, 
which he had earned the day before by chop- 
ping wood, he had bought some bread and sau- 
sage at the station of a woman there who knew 
him, and thought he was going out to his uncle 
Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. This he had 
with him, and this he ate in the darkness and 
the lumbering, pounding, thundering noise 

which made him giddy, as never had he been 
46 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


in a train of any kind before. Still he ate, 
having had no breakfast, and being a child, 
and half a German, and not knowing at all 
how or when he ever would eat again. 

When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, 
but as much as he thought was prudent (for 
who can say when he would be able to buy any- 
thing more ?), he set to work like a little mouse 
to make a hole in the withes of straw and hay 
which enveloped the stove. If it had been put 
in a packing-case he would have been defeated 
at the onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nib- 
bled, and pulled, and pushed just as a mouse 
would have done, making his hole where he 
guessed that the opening of the stove was ; the 
opening through which he had so often thrust 
the big oak logs to feed it. No one disturbed 
him ; the heavy train went lumbering on and 
on, and he saw nothing at all of the beautiful 
mountains, and shining waters, and great for- 
ests through which he was being carried. He 
was hard at work getting through the straw 
and hay and twisted ropes; and get through 
them at last he did, and found the door of the 
stove, which he knew so well, and which was 
47 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


quite large enough for a child of his age to slip 
through, and it was this which he had counted 
upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had 
often done at home for fun, and curled himself 
up there to see if he could anyhow remain dur- 
ing many hours. He found that he could ; air 
came in through the brass fretwork of the stove ; 
and with admirable caution in such a little fel- 
low he leaned out, drew the hay and straw to- 
gether and rearranged the ropes, so that no one 
could ever have dreamed a little mouse had 
been at them. Then he curled himself up 
again, this time more like a dormouse than 
anything; and being safe inside his dear 
Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he went fast 
asleep as if he were in his own bed at home, 
with Albrecht and Christof on either side of 
him. The train lumbered on, stopping often 
and long as the habit of goods trains is, sweep- 
ing the snow away with its cowswitcher, and 
rumbling through the deep heart of the moun- 
tains, with its lamps aglow like the eyes of a 
dog in a night of frost. 

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, 

and the child slept soundly for a long while. 

48 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


When he did awake it was quite dark outside 
in the land ; he could not see, and of course he 
was in absolute darkness; and for a while he 
was sorely frightened, and trembled terribly, 
and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken fashion, 
thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! 
how anxious she would be! How she would 
run over the town and walk up to grand-father’s 
at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over to 
Jenbach, thinking he had taken refuge with 
uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for 
the sorrow he must be even then causing to his 
gentle sister; but it never occurred to him to 
try and go back. If he once were to lose sight 
of Hirschvogel how could he ever hope to find 
it again? how could he ever know whither it 
had gone; north, south, east, or west? The 
old neighbour had said that the world was 
small ; but August knew at least that it must 
have a great many places in it: that he had 
seen himself on the maps on his schoolhouse 
walls. Almost any other little boy would, I 
think, have been frightened out of his wits at 
the position in which he found himself; but 
August was brave, and he had a firm belief that 
4 49 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. 
The master potter of Niirnberg was always 
present to his mind; a kindly, benign, and gra- 
cious spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porce- 
lain tower whereof he had been the maker. 

A droll fancy you say? But every child with 
a soul in him has quite as quaint fancies as this 
one was of August’s. 

So he got over his terror and his sobbing 
both, though he was so utterly in the dark. He 
did not feel cramped at all, because the stove 
was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it 
came through the fretwork running round the 
top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled 
with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He 
could not at all tell the hour. Every time the 
train stopped and he heard the banging, stamp- 
ing, shouting, and jangling of chains that went 
on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. 
If they should find him out! Sometimes por- 
ters came and took away this case and the other, 
a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a 
dead chamois. Every time the men trampled 
near him, and swore at each other, and banged 
this and that to and fro, he was so frightened 

50 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


that his very breath seemed to stop. When 
they came to lift the stove out, would they find 
him? and if they did find him, would they kill 
him? That was what he kept thinking of all 
the way, all through the dark hours, which 
seemed without end. The goods trains are 
usually very slow and are many days going 
what a quick train does in a few hours. This 
one was quicker than most, because it was bear- 
ing goods to the King of Bavaria ; still it took 
all the short winter’s day and the long winter’s 
night and half another day to go over ground 
that the mail trains cover in a forenoon. It 
passed great armoured Kuffstein standing across 
the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the 
right of way to all the foes of Austria. It 
passed twelve hours later, after lying by in out- 
of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that 
marks the border of Bavaria. And here the 
Niirnberg stove, with August inside it, was 
lifted out heedfully, and set under a covered 
way. When it was lifted out the boy had hard 
work to keep in his screams; he was tossed to 
and fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and 
the earthenware walls of his beloved fire-king 

51 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


were not cushions of down. However, though 
they swore and grumbled at the weight of it, 
they never suspected that a living child was 
inside it, and they carried it out on to the plat- 
form and set it down under the roof of the 
goods shed. There it passed the rest of the 
night and all the next morning, and August 
was all the while within it. 

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over 
Rosenheim, and all the vast Bavarian plain was 
one white sheet of snow. If there had not been 
whole armies of men at work always clearing 
the iron rails of the snow, no trains could ever 
have run at all. Happily for August, the thick 
wrappings in which the stove was enveloped 
and the stoutness of its own make screened him 
from the cold, of which, else, he must have 
died — frozen. He had still some of his loaf, 
and a little — a very little — of his sausage. 
What he did begin to suffer from was thirst, 
and this frightened him almost more than any- 
thing, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one 
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men 
had endured because they could not find any 
water but the salt sea. It was many hours 

52 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


since he had last taken a drink from the wooden 
spout of their old pump, which brought them 
the sparkling, ice-cold water of the hills. 

But fortunately for him, the stove having 
been marked and registered as “fragile and 
valuable,” was not treated quite like a mere 
bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station- 
master, who knew its consignees, resolved to 
send it on by a passenger train that would leave 
there at daybreak. And when this train went 
out, in it, amongst piles of luggage belonging 
to other travellers to Vienna, Prague, Buda- 
pest, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, 
still doubled up like a mole in the winter under 
the grass. Those words, “fragile and valu- 
able,” had made the men lift Hirschvogel 
gently and with care. He had begun to get 
used to his prison, and a little used to the in- 
cessant pounding, and jumbling, and rattling, 
and shaking with which modern travel is 
always accompanied, though modern invention 
does deem itself so mightily clever. All in the 
dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; 
but he kept feeling the earthenware sides 
of the Niirnberg giant and saying softly, 
53 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear 
Hirschvogel!” 

He did not say “ Take me back for now 
that he was fairly out in the world, he wished 
to see a little of it. He began to think that 
they must have been all over the world in all 
this time that the rolling, and roaring, and hiss- 
ing, and jangling had been about his ears; shut 
up in the dark he began to remember all the 
tales that had been told in Yule round the fire 
at his grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of 
gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and 
the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, 
and — and — and he began to sob and to tremble 
again, and this time did scream outright. But 
the steam was screaming itself so loudly that 
no one, had there been any one nigh, would 
have heard him ; and in another minute or so 
the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and he 
in his cage could hear men crying aloud 
“Miinchen! Miinchen!” 

Then he knew enough of geography to know 
that he was in the heart of Bavaria. He had 
had an uncle killed in the Bayerischen Wald by 
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excite- 
54 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


ment of hunting a black bear he had overpassed 
the limits of the Tirol frontier. 

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young 
chamois-hunter who had taught him to handle 
a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very 
name of Bavaria a terror to August. 

“ It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!” he sobbed to 
the stove, but the stove said nothing to him ; it 
had no fire in it ; a stove can no more speak 
without fire than a man can see without light. 
Give it fire and it will sing to you, tell tales to 
you, offer you in return all the sympathy you ask. 

“It is Bavaria!” sobbed August; for it is 
always a name of dread augury to the Tiroleans 
by reason of those bitter struggles and midnight 
shots and untimely deaths which come from 
those meetings of Jager and hunter in the Bay- 
erischen Wald. But the train stopped ; Munich 
was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, 
and shaking like a little aspen leaf, felt himself 
once more carried out on the shoulders of men, 
rolled along on a truck, and finally set down, 
where he knew not, only he knew he was thirsty 
— so thirsty! If only he could have reached 
his hand out and scooped up a little snow ! 

55 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


He thought he had been moved on this truck 
many miles, but in truth the stove had been 
only taken from the railway station to a shop in 
the Marienplatz. Fortunately the stove was 
always set upright on its four gilded feet, an 
injunction to that effect having been affixed to 
its written label, and on its gilded feet it stood 
now in the small dark curiosity shop of one 
Hans Rhilfer. 

“ I shall not unpack it till Anton comes,” he 
heard a man’s voice say; and then he heard a 
key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken still- 
ness that ensued he concluded he was alone, 
and venture to peep through the straw and hay. 
What he saw was a small square room filled 
with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue 
jugs, old steel armour, shields, daggers, Chinese 
idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all the 
art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-a- 
brac dealer’s. It seemed a wonderful place to 
him ; but, oh ! was there one drop of water in 
it all? That was his single thought, for his 
tongue was parching, and his throat felt on 
fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked 
as with dust. There was not a drop of water, 
56 





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


but there was a lattice window grated, and be- 
yond the window was a wide stone ledge covered 
with snow. August cast one look at the locked 
door, darted out of his hiding-place, ran and 
opened the window, crammed the snow into his 
mouth again and again, and then flew back into 
the stove, and drew the hay and straw over the 
place he entered by, tied the cords, and shut 
the brass door down on himself. He had 
brought some big icicles in with him, and 
by them his thirst was Anally, if only tempo- 
rarily, quenched. Then he sat still in the 
bottom of the stove, listening intently, wide 
awake, and once more recovering his natural 
boldness. 

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his 
heart and his conscience with a hard squeeze 
now and then ; but he thought to himself, “ If 
I can take her back Hirschvogel, then how 
pleased she will be, and how little ’Gilda will 
clap her hands!” He was not at all selfish in 
his love for Hirschvogel ; he wanted it for them 
all at home quite as much as for himself. 
There was at the bottom of his mind a kind of 
ache of shame that his father — his own father — 
57 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


should have stripped their hearth and sold their 
honour thus. 

A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin 
sculptured on a house-eave near. August had 
felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his pocket, and 
had thrown them to the little bird sitting so 
easily on the frozen snow. 

In the darkness where he was he now heard 
a little song, made faint by the stove-wall and 
the window glass that was between him and it, 
but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was 
the robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. 
August, as he heard, burst into tears. He 
thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw 
out some grain or some bread on the snow be- 
fore the church. “What use is it going there^'" 
she said, “if we forget the s-weetest creatures 
God has made?” Poor Dorothea! Poor, good, 
tender, much-burdened little soul ! He thought 
of her till his tears ran like rain. 

Yet it never once occurred to him to dream 
of going home. Hirschvogel was here. 

Presently the key turned in the lock of the 
door ; he heard heavy footsteps and the voice of 

the man who had said to his father, “ You have 
58 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


a little mad dog; muzzle him!” The voice 
said, “Aye, aye; you have called me a fool 
many times. Now you shall see what I have 
gotten for two hundred dirty florins. Potztau- 
send! never you do such a stroke of work.” 

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, 
and the steps of the two men approached more 
closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a- 
pat, pit-a-pat as a mouse’s does when it is on 
the top of a cheese and hears a housemaid’s 
broom sweeping near. They began to strip 
the stove of its wrappings ; that he could tell 
by the noise they made with the hay and the 
straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly ; that 
too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of 
wonder and surprise and rapture which broke 
from the man who had not seen it before. 

“A right royal thing! A wonderful and 
never-to-be-rivalled thing! Grander than the 
great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime — 
magnificent — matchless !” 

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural 
voices, diffusing a smell of lager-beer so strong 
as they spoke that it reached August crouching 
in his stronghold. If they should open the 
59 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


door of the stove ! That was his frantic fear. 
If they should open it, all would be all over 
with him. They would drag him out; most 
likely they would kill him, he thought, as his 
mother’s young brother had been killed in the 
Wald. 

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in 
his agony; but he had control enough over 
himself to keep quiet, and after standing by 
the Nurnberg master’s work for nigh an hour, 
praising, marvelling, expatiating in the lengthy 
German tongue, the men moved to a little dis- 
tance and began talking of sums of money and 
divided profits, of which discourse he could 
make out no meaning. All he could make out 
was that the name of the king — the king — the 
king came over very often in their arguments. 
He fancied at times they quarrelled, for they 
swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse and 
high ; but after a while they seemed to pacify 
each other and agree to something, and were 
in great glee, and so in these merry spirits 
came and slapped the luminous sides of stately 
Hirschvogel and shouted to it : 

“ Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare 
6o 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


good luck. To think you were smoking in a 
silly fool of a salt-baker’s kitchen all these 
years!” 

Then inside the stove August jumped up, 
with flaming cheeks and clenching hands, and 
was almost on the point of shouting out to them 
that they were the thieves and should say no 
evil of his father, when he remembered, just in 
time, that to breathe a word or make a sound 
was to bring ruin on himself and sever him for 
ever from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still, 
and the men barred the shutters of the little 
lattice and went out by the door, double-locking 
it after them. He had made out from their talk 
that they were going to show Hirschvogel to 
some great person ; therefore he kept quite still 
and dared not move. 

Muffled sounds came to him through the 
shutters from the streets below; the rolling 
of wheels, the clanging of church bells, and 
bursts of that military music which is so sel- 
dom silent in the streets of Munich. An hour 
perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on the 
stairs kept him in perpetual apprehension. In 
the intensity of his anxiety he forgot that he 

6i 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


was hungry and many miles away from cheer- 
ful, old-world little Hall, lying by the clear 
grey river water, with the ramparts of the 
mountains all around. 

Presently the door opened again sharply. 
He could hear the two dealers’ voices murmur- 
ing unctuous words, in which “honour,” “grat- 
itude,” and many fine long noble titles played 
the chief parts. The voice of another person, 
more clear and refined than theirs, answered 
them curtly, and then, close by the Niirnberg 
stove and the boy’s ear, ejaculated a single 
“ Wunderschon ! ” August almost lost his terror 
for himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved 
Hirschvogel being thus admired in the great 
city. He thought the master potter must be 
glad too. 

“ Wu7iderschdn ! ” ejaculated the stranger a sec- 
ond time, and then examined the stove in all 
its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed long on all 
its devices. 

“ It must have been made for the Emperor 
Maximilian,” he said at last; and the poor little 
boy, meanwhile, within, was “hugged up into 

nothing,” as you children say, dreading that 
62 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


every moment he would open the stove. And 
open it truly he did, and examined the brass- 
work of the door ; but inside it was so dark that 
crouching August passed unnoticed, screwed up 
into a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The 
gentleman shut to the door at length, without 
having seen anything strange inside it; and 
then he talked long and low with the trades- 
men, and as his accent was different to that 
which August was used to, the child could dis- 
tinguish little that he said, except the name of 
the king and the word “gulden” again and 
again. After awhile he went away, one of the 
dealers accompanying him, one of them linger- 
ing behind to bar up the shutters. Then this 
one also withdrew again, double-locking the 
door. 

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and 
dared to breathe aloud. 

What time was it? 

Late in the day he thought, for to accompany 
the stranger they had lighted a lamp ; he had 
heard the scratch of the match, and through 
the brass fret-work seen the lines of light. 

He would have to pass the night here, that 

63 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


was certain. He and Hirschvogel were locked 
in, but at least they were together. If only he 
could have had something to eat! He thought 
with a pang of how at this hour at home they 
ate the sweet soup, sometimes with apples in 
it from Aunt Mai’la’s farm orchard, and sang 
together and listened to Dorothea’s reading of 
little tales, and basked in the glow and delight 
that had beamed on them from the great Niirn- 
berg fire-king. 

“ Oh poor, poor little ’Gilda! What is she 
doing without the dear Hirschvogel!” he 
thought. “Poor little ’Gilda! she had only 
now the black iron stove of the ugly little 
kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father!” 

August could not bear to hear the dealers 
blame or laugh at his father, but he did feel 
that it had been so, so cruel to sell Hirsch- 
vogel. The mere memory of all those long 
winter evenings, when they had all closed 
round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab-apples 
in it, and listened to the howling of the wind 
and the deep sound of the church bells, and 
tried very much to make each other believe 

that the wolves still came down from the moun- 
64 


THE nOrNBERG stove. 


tains into the streets of Hall, and were that 
very minute growling at the house door — all 
this memory coming on him with the sound of 
the city bells, and the knowledge that night 
drew near upon him so completely, being added 
to his hunger and his fear, it all so overcame 
him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth 
time since he had been inside the stove, and 
felt that he would starve to death ; and won- 
dered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. 
Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel would care. Had 
he not decked it all summer long with alpine 
roses and edelweiss and heaths, and made it 
sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and great 
garden lilies? Had he ever forgotten when 
Santa Claus came to make it its crown of holly 
and ivy, and wreathe it all around? 

“Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!” 
he prayed to the old fire-king, and forgot, poor 
little man, that he had come on this wildgoose 
chase northward to save and take care of 
Hirschvogel ! 

After a time he dropped asleep, as children 
can do when they weep, and little robust hill- 
born boys most surely do, be they where they 
5 65 


THE NORNBERG stove. 


may. It was not very cold in this lumber- 
room ; it was tightly shut up and very full of 
things, and at the back of it were the hot pipes 
of an adjacent house, where a great deal of fuel 
was burnt. Moreover, August’s clothes were 
warm ones, and his blood was young. So he 
was not cold, though Munich is terribly cold in 
the nights of December; and he slept on and 
on, which was a comfort to him, for he forgot 
his woes, and his perils, and his hunger for a 
time. 

Midnight was once more chiming from all 
the brazen tongues of the city when he awoke ; 
and, all being still around him, ventured to put 
his head out of the brass door of the stove to see 
why such a strange bright light was round him. 

It was a very strange and brilliant light in- 
deed ; and yet, what is perhaps still stranger, 
it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did what 
he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it 
would have done you or me. For what he saw 
was nothing less than all the bric-h-brac in 
motion. 

A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, 

was solemnly dancing a minuet with a plump 
66 







THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going 
through a gavotte with a spindle-legged an- 
cient chair; a very droll porcelain figure of 
Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier 
in terre cuite of Ulm ; an old violin of Cremona 
was playing itself, and a queer little shrill 
plaintive music that thought itself merry came 
from a painted spinnet covered with faded 
roses ; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on 
the wall and laughed; a Dresden mirror was 
tripping about, crowned with flowers, and a 
Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; 
a slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a 
stout Ferrara sabre, all about a little pale-faced 
chit of a damsel in white Nymphenburg china; 
and a portly Franconian pitcher in grh gris was 
calling aloud, “Oh, these Italians! always at 
feud!” But nobody listened to him at all. A 
great number of little Dresden cups and saucers 
were all skipping and waltzing ; the teapots, 
with their broad round faces, were spinning 
their own lids like teetotums; the highbacked 
gilded chairs were having a game of cards to- 
gether; and a little Saxe poodle, with a blue 

ribbon at its throat, was running from one to 
67 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


another, whilst a yellow cat of Cornells Lacht- 
leven’s rode about on a Delft horse in blue 
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light 
shed on the scene came from three silver can- 
delabra, though they had no candles set up in 
them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, 
August looked on at these mad freaks and felt 
no sensation of wonder! He only, as he heard 
the violin and the spinnet playing, felt an irre- 
sistible desire to dance too. 

No doubt his face said what he wished ; for a 
lovely little lady, all in pink and gold and 
white, with powdered hair, and high-heeled 
shoes, and all made of the very finest and fair- 
est Meissen china, tripped up to him, and 
smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him 
out to a minuet. And he danced it perfectly — 
poor little August in his thick, clumsy shoes, 
and his thick, clumsy sheep-skin jacket, and 
his rough homespun linen, and his broad Tiro- 
lean hat! He must have danced it perfectly, 
this dance of kings and queens in days when 
crowns were duly honoured, for the lovely lady 
always smiled benignly and never scolded him 

at all, and danced so divinely herself to the 
68 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


stately measures the spinnet was playing that 
August could not take his eyes off her, till, 
their minuet ended, she sat down on her own 
white-and-gold bracket. 

“ I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” she said 
to him, with a benignant smile; “ and you have 
got through that minuet very fairly.” 

Then he ventured to say to her: 

“ Madam, my princess, could you tell me 
kindly why some of the figures and furniture 
dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner 
like lumber? It does make me curious. Is it 
rude to ask?” 

For it greatly puzzled him why, when some 
of the bric-a-brac was all full of life and motion, 
some was quite still, and had not a single thrill 
in it. 

“My dear child!” said the powdered lady, 
“ is it possible that you do not know the reason? 
Why, those silent, dull things are imitation .'” 

This she said with so much decision, that she 
evidently considered it a condensed but com- 
plete answer. 

“Imitation?” repeated August timidly, not 
understanding. 


69 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!” 
said the princess in pink shoes very vivaciously. 
“ They only pretend to be 'what we are ! They 
never wake up; how can they! No imitation 
ever had any soul in it yet.” 

“Oh!” said August humbly, not even sure 
that he understood entirely yet. He looked at 
Hirschvogel ; surely it had a royal soul within 
it, would it not wake up and speak? Oh dear! 
how he longed to hear the voice of his fire-king ! 
And he began to forget that he stood by a lady 
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white 
china, with the year 1746 cut on it and the 
Meissen mark. 

“What will you be when you are a man?” 
said the little lady sharply, for her black eyes 
were quick though her red lips were smiling, 
“Will you work for the Kdnigliche Porcellan- 
Manufacture like my great dead Kandler?” 

“I have never thought,” said August stam- 
mering; “at least — that is — I do wish — I do 
hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin 
Hirschvogel at Niirnberg.” 

“Bravo!” said all the real bric-a-brac in one 

breath; and the two Italian rapiers left off 
70 





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


fighting to cry Benone!” For there is not a 
bit of true bric-a-brac in all Europe that does 
not know the names of the mighty masters. 

August felt quite pleased to have won so 
much applause, and grew as red as the lady’s 
shoes with bashful contentment. 

“I knew all the Hirschvogel from old Viet 
downwards,” said a fat gres de Flandres beer- 
jug ; “ I myself was made at Niirnberg and he 
bowed to the great stove very politely, taking 
off his own silver hat — I mean lid — with a 
courtly sweep that he could scarcely have 
learned from burgomasters. The stove, how- 
ever, was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for 
what is such heartbreak as a suspicion of what 
we love?) came through the mind of August: 
Was Hirschvogel only imitation ? 

“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself stoutly; 
though Hirschvogel never stirred, never spoke, 
yet would he keep all faith in it! After all 
their happy years together, after all the nights 
of warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt 
his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet 
he had kissed in his babyhood? “No, no, no, 
no!” he said again, with so much emphasis, 

71 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again 
at him. 

“No,” she said with pretty disdain; “no, be- 
lieve me, they may ‘pretend’ for ever. They 
can never look like us! They imitate even our 
marks, but never can they look like the real 
thing, never can they chassent de race.'" 

“ How should they?” said a bronze statuette 
of Vischer’s. “They daub themselves green 
with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get 
rusted ; but green and rust are not patina; only 
the ages can give that!” 

“And my imitations are all in primary col- 
ours, staring colours, hot as the colours of a 
hostelry’s sign-board!” said the Lady of Meis- 
sen with a shiver. 

“ Well, there is a gres de Flanders over there, 
who pretends to be a Hans-Kraut, as I am,” 
said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with 
his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in 
a corner. “ He has copied me as exactly as it 
is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he 
might be mistaken for me. But yet what a 
difference there is! How crude are his blues! 

how evidently done over the glaze are his black 
72 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


letters! He has tried to give himself my very 
twist ; but what a lamentable exaggeration of 
that playful deviation in my lines which in his 
becomes actual deformity!” 

“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordovan 
leather, with a contemptuous glance at a broad 
piece of gilded leather spread out on a table, 
“ They will sell him cheek by jowl with me and 
give him my name, but look! / am overlaid 
with pure gold beaten thin as a film, and laid 
on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego di 
las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cor- 
dova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the 
Most Christian. His gilding is one part gold 
to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and 
it has been laid on him with a brush — a brush ! 
— pah ! of course he will be as black as a crock 
in a few years’ time, whilst I am as bright as 
when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt 
as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine 
on for ever.” 

“ They carve pearwood because it is so soft, 
and dye it brown, and call it me ! ” said an old 
oak cabinet with a chuckle. 

“ That is not so painful, it does not vulgarise 
73 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


you SO much as the cups they paint to-day and 
christen after me!'' said a Carl Theodor cup, 
subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel. 

“ Nothing can be so annoying as to see com- 
mon gimcracks aping me!" interposed the 
princess in the pink shoes. 

“They even steal my motto, though it is 
Scripture,” said a Trauerkrug of Regensburg in 
black and white. 

“ And my own dots they put on plain English 
china creatures!” sighed the little white maid 
of Nymphenburg. 

“And they sell hundreds and thousands of 
common china plates calling them after me, 
and baking my saints and my legends in a 
muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!” said a stout 
plate of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had 
seen the face of Maestro Giorgio. 

“ That is what is so terrible in these bric-a- 
brac places,” said the Princess of Meissen. “ It 
brings one in contact with such low, imitative 
creatures ; one really is safe nowhere nowadays 
unless under glass at the Louvre or South Ken- 
sington.” 

“And they get even there,” sighed the gres 
74 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


de Flandres. “ A terrible thing happened to a 
dear friend of mine, a ierre cuite of Blasius (you 
know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 1560). 
Well, he was put under glass in a museum that 
shall be nameless, and he found himself set 
next to his own imitation born and baked yes- 
terday at Frankfort, and what think you the 
miserable creature said to him with a grin? 
‘Old Pipeclay’ — that is what he called my 
friend — ‘the fellow that bought me got just as 
much commission on me as the fellow that 
bought you^ and that was all that he thought 
about. You know it is only the public money 
that goes!’ And the horrid creature grinned 
again till he actually cracked himself. There 
is a Providence above all things, even mu- 
seums.” 

“ Providence might have interfered before, 
and saved the public money,” said the little 
Meissen lady with the pink shoes. 

“ After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch jar 
of Haarlem. “ All the shamming in the world 
will not make them us!” 

“One does not like to be vulgarised,” said 
the Lady of Meissen angrily. 

75 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“My maker, the Krabbetje,* did not trouble 
his head about that,” said the Haarlem jar 
proudly. “The Krabbetje made me for the 
kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch 
kitchen, well nigh three centuries ago, and now 
I am thought worthy the palace ; yet I wish I 
were at home; yes, I wish I could see the good 
Dutch vrow, and the shining canals, and the 
great green meadows dotted with the kine.” 

“ Ah ! if we could all go back to our makers !” 
sighed the Gubbio plate, thinking of Giorgio 
Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the 
Renaissance: and somehow the words touched 
the frolicsome souls of the dancing jars, the 
spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing 
cards; and the violin stopped its merry music 
with a sob, and the spinnet sighed — thinking 
of dead hands. 

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a 
master for ever lost ; and only the swords went 
on quarrelling, and made such a clattering 
noise, that the Japanese bonze rode at them on 
his monster and knocked them both right over, 

* Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the little Crab, born 
i6io, master potter of Delft and Haarlem. 

76 






THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and they lay straight and still, looking foolish, 
and the little Nymphenburg maid, though she 
was crying, smiled and almost laughed. 

Then from where the great stove stood there 
came a solemn voice. 

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the 
heart of its little human comrade gave a great 
jump of joy. 

“ My friends, ” said that clear voice from the 
turret of Niirnberg faience, “ I have listened to 
all you have said. There is too much talking 
amongst the Mortalities whom one of them- 
selves has called the Windbags. Let not us be 
like them. I hear amongst men so much vain 
speech, so much precious breath and precious 
time wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, 
useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble 
mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech 
a curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom 
all his undertakings. For over two hundred 
years I have never spoken myself ; you, I hear, 
are not so reticent. I only speak now because 
one of you said a beautiful thing that touched 
me. If we all might but go back to our 
makers! Ah, yes; if we might! We were 
77 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


made in days when even men were true creat- 
ures, and so we, the work of their hands, were 
true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, 
derive all the value in us from the fact that our 
makers wrought at us with zeal, with piety, 
with integrity, with faith ; not to win fortunes 
or to glut a market, but to do nobly an honest 
thing and create for the honour of the Arts and 
God. I see amidst you a little human thing 
who loves me, and in his own ignorant childish 
way loves Art. Now I want him for ever to 
remember this night and these words; to re- 
member that we are what we are, and precious 
in the eyes of the world, because centuries ago 
those who were of single mind and of pure hand 
so created us, scorning sham and haste and 
counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master, 
Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and 
blameless life, and wrought in loyalty and love, 
and made his time beautiful thereby, like one 
of his own rich, many-coloured church case- 
ments, that told holy tales as the sun streamed 
through them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go 
back to our masters! — that would be the best 
that could befall us. But they are gone, and 

78 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


even the perishable labours of their lives out- 
live them. For many, many years I, once 
honoured of Emperors, dwelt in a humble house 
and warmed in successive winters three genera- 
tions of little, cold, hungry children. When I 
warmed them they forgot that they were hun- 
gry ; they laughed and told tales, and slept at 
last about my feet. Then I knew that humble 
as had become my lot it was one that my mas- 
ter would have wished for me, and I was con- 
tent. Sometimes a tired woman would creep 
up to me, and smile because she was near me, 
and point out my golden crown or my ruddy 
fruit to a baby in her arms. That Was better 
than to stand in a great hall of a great city, 
cold and empty, even though wise men came to 
gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with 
flattering words. Where I go now I know not ; 
but since I go from that humble house where 
they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They 
pass so soon — those fleeting mortal lives! 
Only we endure: we, the things that the 
human brain creates. We can but bless them 
a little as they glide by; if we have done that, 
we have done what our masters wished. So in 
79 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


US our masters, being dead, yet may speak and 
live.” 

Then the voice sank away in silence, and a 
strange golden light that had shone on the 
great stove faded away; so also the light died 
down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic 
melody stole gently through the room. It 
came from the old, old spinnet that was covered 
with the faded roses. 

Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone 
day died too ; the clocks of the city struck six 
of the morning ; day was rising over the Bay- 
erischen Wald. August awoke with a great 
start, and found himself lying on the bare 
bricks of the floor of the chamber, and all the 
bric-a-brac was lying quite still all around. 
The pretty Lady of Meissen was motionless 
on her porcelain bracket, and the little Saxe 
poodle was quiet at her side. 

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very 
cold, but he was not sensible of it or of the 
hunger that was gnawing his little empty en- 
trails. He was absorbed in the wondrous 
sight, in the wondrous sounds, that he had seen 
and heard. 


8o 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


All was dark around him. Was it still mid- 
night, or had morning come? Morning, sure- 
ly, for against the barred shutters he heard the 
tiny song of the robin. 

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the 
stair. He had but a moment in which to scram- 
ble back into the interior of the great stove, 
when the door opened and the two dealers en- 
tered, bringing burning candles with them to 
see their way. 

August was scarcely conscious of danger more 
than he was of cold or hunger. A marvellous 
sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was 
about him, like strong and gentle arms enfold- 
ing him and lifting him upwards — upwards — 
upwards! Hirschvogel would defend him. 

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the 
redbreast away, and then tramped about in 
their heavy boots and chattered in contented 
voices, and began to wrap up the stove once 
more in all its straw and hay and cordage. 

It never once occurred to them to glance in- 
side. Why should they look inside a stove that 
they had bought and were about to sell again 
for all its glorious beauty of exterior? 

6 8i 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


The child still did not feel afraid. A great 
exaltation had come to him ; he was like one 
lifted up by his angels. 

Presently the two traders called up their 
porters, and the stove, heedfully swathed and 
wrapped and tended as though it were some 
sick prince going on a journey, was borne on 
the shoulders of six stout Bavarians down the 
stairs and out of the door into Marienplatz. 
Even behind all those wrappings August felt 
the icy bite of the intense cold of the outer air 
at dawn of a winter’s day in Munich. The 
men moved the stove with exceeding gentle- 
ness and care, so that he had often been far 
more roughly shaken in his big brother’s arms 
than he was in his journey now; and though 
both hunger and thirst made themselves felt, 
being foes that will take no denial, he was still 
in that state of nervous exaltation which dead- 
ens all physical suffering and is at once a cor- 
dial and an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel 
speak ; that was enough. 

The stout carriers tramped through the city, 
six of them, with the Niirnberg fire-castle on 

their brawny shoulders, and went right across 
82 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


Munich to the railway station, and August in 
the dark recognized all the ugly, jangling, 
pounding, roanng, hissing railway noises, and 
thought, despite his courage and excitement, 
“Will it be a very long journey?” For his 
stomach had at times an odd sinking sensation, 
and his head sadly often felt light and swim- 
ming. If it was a very, very long journey he 
felt half afraid that he would be dead or some- 
thing bad before the end, and Hirschvogel 
would be so lonely: that was what he thought 
most about; not much about himself, and not 
much about Dorothea and the house at home. 
He was “high strung to high emprise,” and 
could not look behind him. 

Whether for a long or short journey, whether 
for weal or woe, the stove with August still 
within it was once more hoisted up into a great 
van ; but this time it was not all alone, and the 
two dealers as well as the six porters were all 
with it. 

He in his darkness knew that; for he heard 
their voices. The train glided away over the 
Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the 
men say something of Berg and the Wurmsee, 

83 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


but their German was strange to him, and he 
could not make out what these names meant. 

The train rolled on with all its fume and 
fuss, and roar of steam, and stench of oil and 
burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly 
on account of the snow which was falling, and 
had fallen all night. 

“ He might have waited till he came to the 
city,” grumbled one man to another. “What 
weather to stay on at Berg!” 

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, 
August could not make out at all. 

Though the men grumbled about the state of 
the roads and the season, they were hilarious 
and well content, for they laughed often ; and 
when they swore, did so good humouredly and 
promised their porters fine presents at New 
Year; and August, like a shrewd little boy as 
he was, who even in the secluded Innthal had 
learned that money is the chief mover of men’s 
mirth, thought to himself with a terrible pang : 

“ They have sold Hirschvogel for some great 
sum! They have sold him already!” 

Then his heart grew faint and sick within 

him, for he knew verv well that he must soon 
' 84 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


die, shut up without food and water thus ; and 
what new owner of the great fire-palace would 
ever permit him to dwell in it? 

“ Never mind, I will die,” thought he; “and 
Hirschvogel will know it.” 

Perhaps you think him a very foolish little 
fellow, but I do not. 

It is always good to be loyal, and ready to 
endure to the end. 

It is but an hour and a quarter that the train 
usually takes to pass from Munich to the Wurm- 
see or Lake of Starnberg ; but this morning the 
journey w^as much slower, because the way was 
encumbered by snow. When it did reach Pos- 
senhofen and stop, and the Niirnberg stove 
was lifted out once more, August could see 
through the fretwork of the brass door, as the 
stove stood upright facing the lake, that this 
Wurmsee was a calm and noble piece of water, 
of great width, with low wooded banks and dis- 
tant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of 
rest. 

It was now near ten o’clock. The sun had 
come forth ; there was a clear grey sky here- 
abouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay 

85 


THE nCrNBERG stove. 


white and smooth everywhere, down to the edge 
of the water, which before long would itself be 
ice. 

Before he had time to get more than a 
glimpse of the green gliding surface, the stove 
was again lifted up and placed on a large boat 
that was in waiting ; one of those very long and 
huge boats which the women in these parts use 
as laundries, and the men as timber-rafts. The 
stove, with much labour and much expenditure 
of time and care, was hoisted into this, and 
August would have grown sick and giddy with 
the heaving and falling if his big brothers had 
not long used him to such tossing about, so that 
he was as much at ease head, as feet, down- 
ward. The stove once in it safely with its 
guardians, the big boat moved across the lake 
to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian 
lake got that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot 
tell ; but Leoni it is. The big boat was a long 
time crossing: the lake here is about three 
miles broad, and these heavy barges are un- 
wieldy and heavy to move, even though they 
are towed and tugged at from the shore. 

“ If we should be too late!” the two dealers 
86 













THE nOrNBERG stove. 


muttered to each other in agitation and alarm. 
“ He said eleven o’clock.’* 

Who was he? thought August; the buyer, of 
course, of Hirschvogel. The slow passage 
across the Wurmsee was accomplished at length : 
the lake was placid ; there was a sweet calm in 
the air and on the water; there was a great 
deal of snow in the sky, though the sun was 
shining and gave a solemn hush to the atmo- 
sphere. Boats and one little steamer were 
going up and down ; in the clear frosty light 
the distant mountains of Zillerthal and the 
Algau Alps were visible; market people, 
cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on 
the banks ; the deep woods of the shores were 
black and grey and brown. Poor August could 
see no thing of a scene that would have de- 
lighted him ; as the stove was now set he could 
only see the old worm-eaten wood of the huge 
barge. 

Presently they touched the pier at Leon. 

“ Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You 
shall drink your reward at Christmas time,” 
said one of the dealers to his porters, who, 
stout, strong men as they were, showed a dis- 

87 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


position to grumble at their task. Encouraged 
by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the 
Niirnberg stove, grumbling again at its pre- 
posterous weight, but little dreaming that they 
carried within it a small panting, trembling 
boy; for August 'began to tremble now that he 
was about to see the future owner of Hirsch- 
vogel. 

“If he look a good, kind man," he thought, 
“ I will beg him to let me stay with it." 

The porters began their toilsome journey, 
and moved off from the village pier. He could 
see nothing, for the brass door was over his 
head, and all that gleamed through it was the 
clear grey sky. He had been tilted on to his 
back, and if he had not been a little mountain- 
eer, used to hanging head-downwards over 
crevasses, and, moreover, seasoned to rough 
treatment by the hunters and guides of the hills 
and the salt-workers in the town, he would have 
been made ill and sick by the bruising and 
shaking and many changes of position to which 
he had been subjected. 

The way the men took was a mile and a half 

in length, but the road was heavy with snow, 
88 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and the burden they bore was heavier still. 
The dealers cheered them on, swore at them 
and praised them in one breath ; besought them 
and reiterated their splendid promises, for a 
clock was striking eleven, and they had been 
ordered to reach their destination at that hour, 
and though the air was so cold the heat-drops 
rolled off their foreheads as they walked, they 
were so frightened at being late. But the por- 
ters would not budge a foot quicker than they 
chose, and as they were not poor four-footed 
carriers their employers dared not thrash them, 
though most willingly would they have done so. 

The road seemed terribly long to the anxious 
tradesmen, to the plodding porters, to the poor 
little man inside the stove, as he kept sinking 
and rising, sinking and rising, with each of 
their steps. 

Where they were going he had no idea, only 
after a very long time he lost the sense of the 
fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the 
brass-work above, and felt by their movements 
beneath him that they were mounting steps or 
stairs. Then he heard a great many different 

voices, but he could not understand what was 
89 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


being said. He felt that his bearers paused 
some time, then moved on and on again. 
Their feet went so softly he thought they must 
be moving on carpet, and as he felt a warm air 
come to him he concluded that he was in some 
heated chambers, for he was a clever little fel- 
low, and could put two and two together, though 
he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty 
stomach felt so strangely. They must have 
gone, he thought, through some very great 
number of rooms, for they walked so long on 
and on, on and on. At last the stove was set 
down again, and, happily for him, set so that 
his feet were downward. 

What he fancied was that he was in some 
museum, like that which he had seen in the 
city of Innspruck. 

The voices he heard were very hushed, and 
the steps seemed to go away, far away, leaving 
him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not 
look out, but he peeped through the brasS'Work, 
and all he could see was a big carved lion’s 
head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It be- 
longed to a velvet fauteuil, but he could not see 

the chair, only the ivory lion. 

90 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


There was a delicious fragrance in the air; a 
fragrance as of flowers. “ Only how can it be 
flowers?” thought August. “ It is November!” 

From afar off, as it seemed, there came a 
dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spin- 
net’s had been, but so much fuller, so much 
richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels 
were singing all together. August ceased to 
think of the museum; he thought of heaven. 
Are we gone to the Master?” he thought, re- 
membering the words of Hirschvogel. 

All was so still around him ; there was no 
sound anywhere except the sound of the far-off 
choral music. 

He did not know it, but he was in the royal 
castle of Berg, and the music he heard was the 
music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant 
room some of the motives of Parcival. 

Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and 
he heard a low voice say, close beside him, 
“So!” An exclamation no doubt, he thought, 
of admiration and wonder at the beauty of 
Hirschvogel. 

Then the same voice said, after a long pause, 
during which no doubt, as August thought, 

91 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


this new-comer was examining all the details of 
the wondrous fire-tower : “ It was well bought ; 

it is exceedingly beautiful! It is most un- 
doubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel.” 

Then the hand of the speaker turned the 
round handle of the brass door, and the fainting 
soul of the poor little prisoner within grew sick 
with fear. 

The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn 
open, someone bent down and looked in, and 
the same voice that he had heard in praise of 
its beauty called aloud in surprise, “What is 
this in it? A live child!” 

Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, 
and dominated by one master-passion, sprang 
out of the body of the stove and fell at the feet 
of the speaker. 

“Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me 
stay” he sobbed. “I have come all the way 
with Hirschvogel!” 

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not 
gently by an)* means, and their lips angrily 
muttered in his ear, “Little knave, peace, be 
quiet, hold your tongue! It is the king!” 

They were about to drag him out of the au- 
92 




V 




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


gust atmosphere as if he had been some venom- 
ous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but the 
voice he had heard speak of the stove said in 
kind accents, “ Poor little child ! he is very 
young. Let him go; let him speak to me.” 

The word of a king is law to his courtiers; 
so, sorely against their wish, the angry and as- 
tonished chamberlains let August slide out of 
their grasp, and he stood there in his little 
rough sheepskin coat and his thick, mud-covered 
boots, with his curling hair all in a tangle, in 
the midst of the most beautiful chamber he had 
ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a young 
man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes full of 
dreams and fire: and the young man said to 
him : 

“My child, how came you here, hidden in 
this stove? Be not afraid ; tell me the truth. I 
am the king.” 

August in an instinct of homage cast his 
great battered black hat with the tarnished 
gold tassels down on the floor of the room, and 
folded his little brown hands in supplication. 
He was too intensely in earnest to be in any 
way abashed ; he was too lifted out of himself 
93 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


by his love for Hirschvogel to be conscious of 
any awe before any earthly majesty. He was 
only so glad — so glad it was the king. Kings 
were always kind; so the Tirolese think, who 
love their lords. 

“Oh, dear king!” he said with trembling 
entreaty in his faint little voice, “ Hirschvogel 
was ours, and we have loved it all our lives; 
and father sold it. And when I saw that it did 
really go from us, then I said to myself I would 
go with it; and I have come all the way inside 
it. And last night it spoke and said beautiful 
things. And I do pray you to let me live with 
it, and I will go out every morning and cut 
wood for it and you, if only you will let me stay 
beside it. No one ever has fed it with fuel but 
me since I grew big enough, and it loves me— 
it does indeed; it said so last night; and it said 
that it had been happier with us than if it were 
in any palace ” 

And then his breath failed him, and as he 
lifted his little eager, pale face to the young 
king’s great tears were falling down his cheeks. 

Now the king likes all poetic and uncommon 
things, and there was that in the child’s face 
94 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


which pleased and touched him. He motioned 
to his gentlemen to leave the little boy alone. 

“ What is your name?” he asked him. 

“ I am August Strehla. My father is Hans 
Strehla. We live in Hall, in the Innthal ; and 
Hirschvogel has been ours so long — so long!” 

His lips quivered with a broken sob. 

“And have you truly travelled inside this 
stove all the way from Tirol?” 

“ Yes, ” said August ; “ no one thought to look 
inside till you did.” 

The king laughed ; then another view of the 
matter occurred to him. 

“ Who bought the stove of your father?” he 
inquired. 

“Traders of Munich,” said August, who did 
not know that he ought not to have spoken to 
the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little 
brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round 
its one central idea. 

“ What sum did they pay your father, do you 
know?” asked the sovereign. 

“Two hundred florins,” said August with a 
great sigh of shame. “ It was so much money, 
and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.” 

95 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. 
“ Did these dealers of Munich come with the 
stove?" 

He was answered in the affirmative. He 
desired them to be sought for and brought 
before him. As one of his chamberlains has- 
tened on the errand the monarch looked at 
August with compassion. 

“You are very pale, little fellow; when did 
you eat last?" 

“ I had some bread and sausage with me ; 
yesterday afternoon I finished it.^ 

“You would like to eat now?" 

“ If I might have a little water I would be 
glad ; my throat is very dry. " 

The king had water and wine brought for 
him, and cake also; but August, though he 
drank eagerly, could not swallow anything. 
His mind was in too great a tumult. 

“ May I stay with Hirschvogel — may I stay?" 
he said with feverish agitation. 

“Wait a little," said the king, and asked 
abruptly, “ What do you wish to be when you 
are a man?" 

“ A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel 
96 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


was — I mean the master that made my Hirsch- 
vogel.” 

“I understand,” said the king. 

Then the two dealers were brought into their 
sovereign’s presence. They were so terribly 
alarmed, not being either so innocent or so 
ignorant as August was, that they were trem- 
bling as though they were being led to the 
slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished 
too at a child having come all the way from 
Tirol in the stove, as a gentleman of the court 
had just told them this child had done, that 
they could not tell what to say or where to 
look, and presented a very foolish aspect in- 
deed. 

“ Did you buy this Niirnberg stove of this 
little boy’s father for two hundred florins?” the 
king asked them ; and his voice was no longer 
soft and kind as it had been when addressing 
the child, but very stern. 

“Yes, your Majesty,” murmured the trem- 
bling traders. 

“And how much did the gentleman who pur- 
chased it for me give to you?” 

“Two thousand ducats, your Majesty,” mut- 
7 97 


THE NURNBERG STOYE. 


tered the dealers, frightened out of their wits, 
and telling the truth in their fright. 

The gentleman was not present; he was a 
trusted counsellor in art matters of the king’s, 
and often made purchases for him. 

The king smiled a little, and said nothing. 
The gentleman had made out the price to him 
as eleven thousand ducats. 

“You will give at once to this boy’s father 
the two thousand gold ducats that you received, 
less the two hundred Austrian florins that you 
paid him,’’ said the king to his humiliated and 
abject subjects. “You are great rogues. Be 
thankful you are not more greatly punished.” 

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, 
and to one of these gave the mission of making 
the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their 
ill-gotten gains. 

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. 
Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats for his 
father! Why his father would never need to 
go any more to the salt-baking! And yet 
whether for ducats or for florins Hirschvogel 
was sold just the same, and would the king le 

him stay with it — would he? 

98 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“Oh, do! oh, please do!” he murmured, join- 
ing his little brown weather-stained hands, and 
kneeling down before the young monarch, who 
himself stood absorbed in painful thought, for 
the deception so basely practised for the greedy 
sake of gain on him by a trusted counsellor was 
bitter to him. 

He looked down on the child, and as he did 
so smiled once more. 

“Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a kind 
voice; “kneel only to your God. Will I let 
you stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will; 
you shall stay at my court, and you shall be 
taught to be a painter — in oils or on porcelain 
as you will — and you must grow up worthily, 
and win all the laurels at our Schools of Art, 
and if when you are twenty-one years old you 
have done well and bravely, then I will give 
you your Niirnberg stove, or if I am no more 
living, then those who reign after me shall do 
so. And now go away with this gentleman, 
and be not afraid, and you shall light a fire 
every morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not 
need to go out and cut the wood.” 

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand; 

99 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


the courtiers tried to make August understand 
that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, 
but August could not understand that anyhow, 
he was too happy. He threw his two arms 
about the king’s knees, and kissed his feet pas- 
sionately ; then he lost all sense of where he 
was, and fainted away from hunger, and tire, 
and emotion, and wondrous joy. 

As the darkness of his swoon closed in on 
him, he heard in his fancy the voice from 
Hirschvogel saying : 

“ Let us be worthy our maker!” 

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy 
scholar, and promises to be a great man. 
Sometimes he goes back for a few days to Hall, 
where the gold ducats have made his father 
prosperous. In the old house-room there is a 
large white porcelain stove of Munich, the 
king’s gift to Dorothea and ’Gilda. 

And August never goes home without going 
into the great church and saying his thanks to 
God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey 
in the Niirnberg stove. As for his dream in 
the dealers’ room that night, he will never 
admit that he did dream it; he still declares 

TOO 



k 







THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


that he saw it all, and heard the voice of 
Hirschvogel, And who shall say that he did 
not? for what is the gift of the poet and the 
artist except to see the sights which others 
cannot see and to hear the sounds that others 
cannot hear? 

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